A Pitcher in Zipper Boots
I had an uncle named Dallas. This post is about him and a couple things he did during his life, random and unusual things I will never forget.
Dallas used to wear a leather band on his watch, an extraordinarily thick one. The watch was always worn with the dial under his wrist, not above it. Why? I have no idea. I asked him about it once, and he rotated his left wrist up and to the left and said: “If I want to know what time it is, I do this.” Fair enough.
Dallas was a big wrestling fan. Andre the Giant was the strongest, baddest man on the planet, he wouldn’t let anyone dispute that. I remember him booing The Shiek, an apparent and blatant cheater. How is the ref not seeing that? He cheered Bruno Sammartino and got riled up when Gorilla Monsoon got up to his usual shenanigans. That world was black and white, no one was wearing a grey hat, and Dallas loved it.
He had a great sense of humor, totally out of proportion to everything else about him. And, believe me, that was an excellent thing. He used to hand me a hammer as he held a piece of rebar vertically with the end touching the ground. He would say, “OK…when I nod my head hit it.” He thought that was hilarious, but not nearly as funny as his favorite comedian, the remarkably unfunny Raymond J. Johnson, Jr.
As far as I can tell, Johnson had one bit. People would address him by his name, and he would say to them that there were numerous other names they could call him by; they didn’t have to use the particular one that they just used. Here is a typical Ray Jay Johnson inspired encounter between my uncle and me:
Hi, Dallas.
Dallas, you doesn’t hasta call me Dallas. You can call me Dal, or you can call me Donley, or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me Junior…but you doesn’t hasta call me Dallas.
Now, this went on whenever I mentioned his name. He loved that bit. Ray Jay Johnson has clips on the internet, some of them are national beer commercials. Such was the fame of Ray Jay Johnson.
We used to go bowling when I was a kid. One Saturday night, we went to a local bowling alley for what they called Razzle Dazzle. There were colored pins mixed in with the regular white ones. If a head pin came up a particular color, you got money if you threw a strike. Different color pins were worth different amounts of money. The red pin in the headpin position was worth $25, a nice chunk of change back in the 1970s.
You guessed it, it was Dallas’ turn, and there it was front and center, the red headpin. He waited for the person at the desk to acknowledge the situation. It only took a few seconds for the loudspeaker to engage. “Red pin on lane 16.” The other bowlers stopped. The $25 shot was the big one. Some nights went by without it ever coming up. This was a big deal.
Dallas took his ball and cradled it as he dried his hand. He might have said a silent prayer, I really don’t know. With all eyes upon him, Dallas went through his regular routine. He raised the ball up in the air with both hands as he took a giant step to his right. As the ball dropped, he slowly started his approach. He reared back and released, as the ball left his hand it drifted right, completely missing the headpin. Dallas turned and started walking back toward the seats, totally dejected. Then something happened, something I had never seen before or since. The pins started dropping from the back forward, slowly one after the other as if they were in slow motion. Dallas saw me point down the lane, he turned just as the headpin, the last pin standing, started to slowly wobble and then fall. The place exploded in cheers as Dallas jogged up to the counter to get his money. Simply remarkable.
Dallas was not just a bowler, he, along with my friends and I, used to play a lot of softball when we were younger. I had a long list of names and numbers by the telephone at my parent’s house. I would call someone to try to get a game together, they would make some calls, and then those people would make some calls, and when everyone was done, we could usually get a bunch of people to play. We would have neighborhood games, and then we would often challenge people from other schools to play against us. We played a lot of those types of games.
One day we played a bunch of kids from the local Catholic school. The games could get pretty competitive. Most of the kids who showed up played high school baseball, along with lots of other sports. In fact, those kids from the Catholic school would go on to win a state championship in baseball a few years later. And yes, among their ranks was a young man who would grow up to become a famous football coach. I can’t quite remember if Urban Meyer was there on the day my story takes place, he certainly could have been. Lots of his teammates used to show up for these games.
We were all warming up when Dallas appeared just as the game was about to begin. I asked him if he was ready, and if he wanted to pitch. He said sure and took the mound with no warm-up. The first three batters were mowed down in quick succession. Then something unusual happened. He did it the next inning and the next and the next.
Around the fourth or fifth inning, I realized Dallas hadn’t allowed a run. He was pitching a shutout, in a softball game, against a group of young men who were to become state champions in a few years. When I mentioned to one of the other players that Dallas hadn’t given up a run yet, he nodded and said: “Yeah, I know. I can’t believe it.”
Keep in mind that many of these games finished with scores in the 20s or maybe even the 30s. Pitchers did not fare well in our games, offense dominated…except for that day. Dallas pitched a shutout. He hadn’t realized what he had done, and no one made that big of a deal of it. We all got on with our day after the last out was recorded. And here I am, over four decades later, checking the time on my upside-down watch. Every time I look at it, I am reminded of the day my Uncle Dallas pitched a shutout against a team of future state champions while wearing zipper boots.
